Now, she is finally earning money and gets $6000! And, you want to take it away from her and put it in a joint account where you will essentially control and spend it to pay for bills and expenses that she has never paid and that she knows you can pay since you did pay it before.

She knows she had a $900 allowance before when she wasn't earning...and now that she is, you suggest taking "her" $5500 and leaving her $500 for an allowance...less than she made before.

Along with this, it appears to me (and I could be as wrong about it as I was about the size of the allowance :) ), that you are the one controlling where all the other money gets spent. While I completely agree with wanting a safety factor, if your DW doesn't buy into it that's something you both need to look at. And if she's not interested in vacations (as you've said), then the fact that she gets to go along doesn't really mean much if you get to choose that the money is spent there and she doesn't (I understand that you've cut back on vacations now but the idea still applies). Best is to look at it all together and decide what's important and where you'll let the other person's preferences "win".

For me, it was much easier to make drastic cuts after we sat down and hashed it all out - and reached consensus on what the important things were. Before that I just fumed about how much we were spending on what he wanted that I didn't care about.

It still is hardest for me to set aside money in the areas that I don't> care about (my DH wants to spend more money fixing up the house than I want to and he believes in big Christmas spending) but I remind myself that we're putting money to areas that DH doesn't care about.

We came to agreement on how much should go to Emergency Fund [could lose your job fund], retirement, college savings, house payoff, house fixup and other big ticket items like that AND on how important each one was in the funding process. At that point, we did choose to split the rest evenly and allow each of us to spend it as we like. Which currently means he's spending all of his and I'm saving some of mine but hey, that's just how it is now - I've been the one spending all of mine while he was saving some of his in the past.

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